I don’t know if you remember when people were doing their 100 Things Worth Doing lists back in March, but I was traveling at the time and paying for internet by the hour so I didn’t get to put mine up. Today, though, I’m in the mood to think about some good times, so here, in no particular order, are the first twenty-five things I hope I think about as I lay dying.
1. Ashley and I make shoes out of grapetree leaves and mud at the beach behind her house; she makes me promise never to tell anyone.
2. The sun comes up as I descend underwater to the Great Barrier Reef.
3. Jem is there to pick me up at the airport when I arrive in Auckland for the first time.
4. In the whitewashed chapel somewhere in the Dominican Republic we sing the same praise song over and over again; my throat opens up and my voice blends perfectly in with everyone else’s.
5. I receive my first thank-you note from a therapy client.
6. He is there waiting for me on the other side of the customs gate in Malpensa airport.
7. My mother sets up an old style filmstrip projector for us to watch Hoppity on the bare living room wall every Friday night when we first moved to the island in the late seventies.
8. I walk into Amy’s parents’ house and her father yells from the kitchen: “Hello daughter number two!”
9. My sister and I play for hours in my cousin’s old apartment in Queens with her 1950’s-era Barbie.
10. I walk down Courtenay Place in the summer sunshine listening to Jarvis Cocker, sunglasses on, hair wild and ridiculous, absolutely free.
11. Another kid asks for my autograph when I play a princess in a local college’s production of Many Moons, age ten.
12. My sister and I make little houses in the backyard out of Australian pine needles for the three litters of kittens we have at our house the summer I am twelve.
13. After the hurricane in 1992 all the kids walk around the island, dragging Hefty bags and hammers, going house to house to see if there’s anything we can do to help because school has been delayed for a month.
14. I type up and pass out copies of my paper journals from the mission trips because people want to read them.
15. My mother recognizes every flower in the garden of the Musee Du Moyen Age in Paris, where we have gone on a mother-daughter weekend trip.
16. We all put on silly costumes and Anna takes pictures for her birthday party; afterwards we play Dance Dance Revolution and go skinny-dipping in the ABL pool.
17. I take a glorious nap in the quiet afternoon tea house at Shambhala in Nelson.
18. I sneak around the half-built mansions on the island in the middle of the night with Andrew after he knocks on my old bedroom window and apologizes for not having reciprocated my crush in high school.
19. Anna and Sean and I talk all night; he grills tofu and veggies and we sit outside until it’s too chilly to stay. Later she takes me home and we sit in the driveway for an hour like teenagers.
20. I drive home from high school, a thousand times, ten thousand times, over the rise of the bridge in the sun, the color of the water and the mangroves unlike anywhere else in the world.
21. I wrap up my dolls in tissue paper before we go to visit my dad in New York for the summer, so they won’t get cold while I’m away.
22. Calin hugs me in the car and says “I’ve missed you these past six years.”
23. I eat a bowl of soup and do my social work readings in that first basement apartment in Seattle in 1999, listening to a CD of Costa Rican guitar music my mom sent me.
24. I drive out of Ballard with tears streaming down my face, setting New Zealand in motion.
25. I wait for Marah at the entrance of the Uffizi, wearing a long black dress and writing postcards; the security guard comes up to me and tells me, in Italian, that all the other art students are going in now and I should follow them.